Greece and the Ægean Islands. Philip Sanford Marden

      The days in which a visit to Greece might be set down as something quite unusual and apart from the beaten track of European travel have passed away, and happily so. The announcement of one’s intention to visit Athens and its environs no longer affords occasion for astonishment, as it did when Greece was held to be almost the exclusive stamping-ground of the more strenuous archæologists. To be sure, those who have never experienced the delights of Hellenic travel are still given to wonderment at one’s expressed desire to revisit the classic land; but even this must pass away in its turn, since few voyage thither without awakening that desire.

      It is no longer an undertaking fraught with any difficulty—much less with any danger—to visit the main points of interest in the Hellenic kingdom; and, what is more to the purpose in the estimation of many, it is no longer an enterprise beset with discomfort, to any greater degree than is involved in a journey through Italy. The result of the growing consciousness of this fact has been a steadily increasing volume of travel to this richest of classic lands—richest not alone in its intangible memories, but richest also in its visible monuments of a remote past, presenting undying evidence of the genius of the Greeks for expressing the beautiful in terms of marble and stone. One may, of course, learn to appreciate the beautiful in Greek thought without leaving home, embodied as it is in the imposing literary remains to be met with in traversing the ordinary college course. But in order fully to know the beauty of the sculptures and architecture, such as culminated in the age of Pericles, one must visit Greece and see with his own eyes what the hand of Time has spared, often indeed in fragmentary form, but still occasionally touched with even a new loveliness through the mellowing processes of the ages.

      To any thinking, reading man or woman of the present day, the memories, legends, and history of ancient Greece must present sufficient attraction. Few of us stop to realize how much of our modern thought and feeling was first given adequate expression by the inhabitants of ancient Athens, or how much of our own daily speech is directly traceable to their tongue. Modern politics may still learn much tact of Pericles, and oratorical excellence of Æschines, as modern philosophy has developed from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Is it not even true that a large part of modern religious thought, the hope of glory at least, if not the means of grace, finds its strongest foreshadowing in the groping of the more enlightened Athenians for a hope of immortality and life beyond the grave? The transition of the crowning architectural glory of the Acropolis at Athens from a temple of the virgin (parthenos) Athena to a church of the Virgin Mary was, after all, not so violent, when it is remembered that the later paganism had softened from its old system of corrupt personal deities to an abstract embodiment of their chief attributes or qualities, such as wisdom, healing, love, and war. Down to this day the traces of the pagan, or let us say the classic period, are easy to discern, mingled with the modern Greek Christianity, often unconsciously, and of course entirely devoid of any content of paganism, but still unmistakably there. To this day festivals once sacred to Asklepios still survive, in effect, though observed on Christian holy days and under Christian nomenclature, with no thought of reverence for the Epidaurian god, but nevertheless preserving intact the ancient central idea, which impelled the worshiper to sleep in the sanctuary awaiting the healing visit of a vision. In every church in Greece to-day one may see scores of little metal arms, legs, eyes, and other bodily organs hung up as votive offerings on the iconastasis, or altar screen, just as small anatomical models were once laid by grateful patients on the shrine of Asklepios at Cos. It is most striking and impressive, this interweaving

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